Tuesday, July 7, 2009

When "Liberal Christians" are neither, pt. II - "kick the %@#& out of" those who leave gay lifestyle

Yesterday, I posted this piece on a "liberal Christian's" comparison of another Christian to Hitler.Well, the comments that are allowed to stand at the "liberal Christian" thread (still entitled Gas your enemies) make the whole matter worse. One "Poppy Tupper" writes:I smile at the way he dangles his baby over the cyber-balcony - 'look at me, I can make babies after all. I'm straight'. I shudder at his bad-boy attempts to be acceptable to the evangelicals. Rather too shrill to be true, I always think. Just imagine I'm the woman in the pub pulling your arm and saying, 'leave him, David. He's not worth it,' before you drag him out to the car park and kick the shit out of him.When another commenter reacts to this, "Poppy" retorts:Wilfried, much though I detest Mr Ould I would hate to see him beaten up, although he is so full of shit that there has to be some way of getting it out of him. I'm guessing you're American. My post included elements of what we in England call humour.But there you have it. Liberal Christians have only two arguments:

If you disagree with me, you must be neurotic.

If you disagree with me, you must be stupid.

And because we are all neurotic and stupid and they are our betters, it is perfectly fine for them to joke about beating people in parking lots or to speak in stereotypes.

14 comments:

You really do take things too seriously! No one is going to beat anyone up. Everyone knows it is medically and scientifically impossible to "cure" someone's sexuality. When someone peddles biblical solutions to psycho-sexual orientation they are being dangerous and disingenuous. As a 'straight' man, I defend my gay Christian friends' right to belong to God's Church without so-called "bible-believers" telling them they're not worthy. I am not a "liberal". I am a traditional Anglican who warmly welcomes everyone to my Church. I think Our Lord would do the same. Even you would be welcome.

Short question: how much credence do you think a judge takes to the argument, "we were just havin' a laugh" on some skinheads' blog, when he writes "yeah lets go kick the s*** outta some gays," after having compared gays to Nazis?

There are things which go beyond the pale of humour, Fr. David. Grow up and give up the collar, or give up the blog, you obviously don't have the knack of doing both simultaneously and some callings exclude other callings.

I've found it true that when someone says: "Everyone knows..." it is probably not true. There have been a number of cases where men and women have left a gay lifestyle and become functionally heterosexual.

I do not believe that anyone is "worthy" of being a Christian. That's the good news - while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. But God does not leave us where we are.

On the subject of Liberal/Progressive arrogance. The idea that we must disagree with them because we are either stupid or insane or uneducated is deep in their psyche. It is this same arrogance that gets them to believe that they know better than anyone in history what God's will is. It seems odd to me that God's will seems an awful lot like their own will.

Half of the women that identified themselves as lesbian in their teens describe themselves as heterosexual by their thirties.

But guys like Heron arrogantly think they know these women better than they know themselves.

And he tries to proffer the dangers of conversion therapy myth. Leading a homosexual lifestyle is very risky to mental and physical health. Male homosexuals have a 3.6 times higher rate of suicide attempts.

And I am with Wilf. "Let's beat up the queers" is bad, but "let's beat up the ex-homosexual" is quite droll. Sorry, but no.

What a phoney storm this is. As far as I am aware Peter Ould and David Heron are hundreds of miles apart and have no intention of ever being in the same pub as each other. So, when I talked about David kicking the shit out of Peter it was, of course, a metaphorical fight, not a fist fight. How difficult is that to work out? Are we all familiar with the idea of cyberspace? I don't think that everyone who disagrees with me is either neurotic or stupid, but I am beginning to think that Wilf is both.

Look, I've had to sit through seminary sermons and classes hearing things like, "Every time you say, 'Our Father', you are justifying rape." Plenty of church direction here in TEC and I would wager in CofE as well has been set by people making such absurd claims. Same in government, for that matter.

Once you use that as a policy tool, and it is a policy tool for "liberal Christians", you lose the moral right to make the kinds of jokes that Fr. David made. "Systemic violence. Insensitivity. Unresolved anger issues." You know the blather. You know the drill. So don't complain to me.

TLF. You should really learn not to start comments, or conversations by saying 'look', as though to call us to order, but, passing on, I'm slightly confused. You accuse me of 'ire', but I wasn't angry, and you accuse me of complaining when I wasn't complaining. Do you have problems reading people?

Thank you for proving Fr. Tim's point. We all know that it is wrong to talk about or do violence to any person - except those who are conservatives. Then it is OK to talk about rape (David Letterman) or, as you have done, assult. There are all sorts of ways to talk about winning a debate before you reduce yourself to vulgar talk about kicking the "shit" out of someone. Christians do not act or speak or talk in such ways about other Christians.

poppy tupper, suppose I were a man vehemently against the notion that the church should condone men having sex with men. I find a blog of a man who does have sex with men, and is arguing for the viewpoint that the church should accept this. I then go on to write my own blog article about how he's like a Nazi ("there were quite a few famous gay ones you know! And doesn't he look Aryan! etc.") and then a commenter writes something about how the reader will be wanting to kick the **** out of him.

How fast do you think I'd be accused of incitement toward hatred and violence, me wonders?

And how would GLAAD respond when I said, "it was metaphorical look it up in the **** dictionary!"

Poppy, your "victim" being unpopular amongst gays does not make barbarity any less barbarous, and words - AND METAPHORS - have been very effective tools at promoting violence. Why not just own up to it and admit that you're not a very tolerant person, and that you're more just into humor, or something like that?

We are at loggerheads and into restatement of our positions on this, so I am going to close the thread with the existing comments still showing.

I think that there is at least some of the cultural misunderstanding alluded to in Fr. David's and Poppy's posts. There are some things that I am probably missing that someone in the UK would more readily catch and laugh about.

At the same time, I don't think either of them grasp how big a deal the "gotcha" game is in the U.S. Every word, especially every traditional word, goes under a microscope for traces of misogyny, homophobia, genocide, environmental destruction, you name it. People don't get through seminary because of such hypersensitivity. People are denied ordination and denied access to clergy search lists because of it. The Presiding Bishop just called confessional Christianity "heresy," and she sure wasn't being funny.

But more than this, here we have a thread with two groups (I'm inlcuding myself in one, and not criticizing members of either), both containing people who identify themselves with Jesus Christ, and we can't find common language to cool off a bit of friction between us.

I won't assume anything about the CofE, but I can tell you that TEC is killing itself via that very problem.

The lot of us could be quite rich if we could come up with the solution and bottle it... although I'm sure it is sitting right in front of us all and we are simply blind to it (including myself once again).